by Glynn James
Most people living in the Outer Zone, in the ruins of the old city, didn't get to bathe very often. Some of them never. Fresh water was a rare commodity and was more than often used for drinking. There were water springs in various places, but they were guarded by gangs, or were in the centre of one of the hovels that littered the ruins, and never out in the open or in a place that was accessible to just anyone. Of all the things that were considered valuable in the Outer Zone, clean water was among the highest.
And right then Jack would do anything for a drink.
He thought of Ryan again, and how the boy must have felt making this journey. This was frightening even to Jack, who wasn't disturbed by many things after such a long time in the ruins. But to a boy, this must have been terrifying.
Someone shoved him onto his back and Jack felt a large figure move past him, as whoever it was struggled to their feet, and then there was a roar of annoyance.
"Where the hell am I?" boomed the gruff voice of a man Jack figured must have been unconscious for the journey so far. Jack couldn’t place it, but way back and hidden in his mind somewhere, that voice was familiar.
When no answer came, the man pushed forward, and though Jack couldn't see what was going on, he heard others crying out as the man unleashed his fury on them. Jack was just sitting up when a heavy weight landed upon him. Another man - or a woman - struggled and rolled over him as Jack pushed them off, trying not to push so hard that he would injure the person. It wasn’t a courtesy that most would give but he saw no reason to increase the suffering of those around him. It was as bad for them as it was for him. Worse even.
At least he had volunteered.
"Let me out you—" the man bellowed, but he was cut off as the vehicle swerved sharply around another corner. Jack heard a loud thud on the side of the vehicle, and then another loud thud, a grunt, and then silence. Jack thought that in the second impact he had heard a cracking noise, like small bones breaking.
Unconscious again, thought Jack, as the vehicle quickly swerved, this time to the left. The fool, whoever this man with the familiar voice was, had been standing with nothing to hold on to, and nothing to counter the gravity of the swerving vehicle. At least he wouldn’t beat on anyone else for a while.
He went back to the movement and speed of the vehicle. Trying to adjust his bearings once more.
We’re into 342nd Street. And now we're passing the old rail station.
And still the vehicle sped onwards.
We’re getting close to the old pits and the open ground not far from the rail station.
And that was where once, when Jack had been much younger, the slave baron Jagan had kept his camp. It had been where the pit fights, a dark time in Jack's life, had taken place. A time he tried hard to forget about.
The vehicle slowed, then almost halted, but then Jack's stomach lurched as it shot upwards, as though climbing a hill.
No hills here. So where were they going now? Had he missed something?
But he wasn’t sure. His mind scrambled over the terrain, recalling everything in the area, searching for a section of high ground. But he knew there was nothing for the vehicle to climb up like this, unless...
We're going into the dropship.
We must be. There are no hills in this area, only pits. Pits full of the bones of Jagan's Gladiators. That would be a good place for something as large as the dropship to land.
All that open space.
The vehicle moved slowly now, as though navigating narrow lanes with care, turning left, then right, and then finally stopping. There were more cries of fear from the other passengers, but Jack sat in silence, thinking only of Ryan.
If the boy could survive this, get through it all, then I can. All I need to do is keep my nerves steady, stay calm.
Breathe.
Whatever happens next, none of it matters if it means I end up in the place where Ryan is, or at least where he was two years ago.
They won't kill us, surely?
Would they? It was possible, wasn’t it? But that would be ridiculous. Why would they go to so much trouble to round up people only to kill them?
Unless they did kill people, maybe the weak ones, he thought. That was also a possibility.
But you're not weak, are you? Maybe some of these others are, and they will die, but you're still strong. Getting older, and prone to coughs in bad weather, but still strong. And the boy had been strong, always had been, even though he was slight of build. Ryan had proven time and again that he wasn't as weak as Jack had first thought when he saw him sitting on the sidewalk the day they met. As soon as the boy had been fed a few times he'd started to become less gaunt and more human. And even though he was still thin, there had been a grittiness to him, a stubbornness that wasn't just in his attitude.
A thought cut through the silence.
Ryan would be nine years old now. He wouldn't be as small as he had been back then. He could even be a foot taller. He’d surely be more lean and muscular. He always was a strong kid.
As a hissing noise filled the darkness around him, and a faint mustard smell entered his nostrils, Jack's mind went back once more looking for somewhere to hide, to a time when they had been together.
Like a father and son. That's also what he had thought the day they celebrated Ryan's birthday that first time.
Ant Soup
Two Years Before
They'd celebrated Ryan's birthday on the anniversary of the day that Jack found him. It was the only day that Jack could use, because Ryan couldn't remember when his birthday was.
"My parents always told me when my birthday was," Ryan had said when Jack first asked him as they sat on the flat edge of a warehouse loading bay. "I never thought about it."
It seemed that an even colder winter than usual was on its way. At least that was how it appeared to Jack. The bitter, cold wind was early by several weeks, and although they had supplies stashed it wouldn't be enough to last the entire three months of bad weather to come. Jack had known then that they would have to resort to trading something that he didn't want to part with or they'd be hunting rats. But it wasn't turning just yet, not quite.
He thought, as they sat there looking out over the expanse of ruins that was the Far Reaches, a place further out from the middle of the city than Jack liked to go, that they'd manage, they would get by, and he was determined to enjoy the last of the fading summer before the snow drifts came.
Every year, when the weather was just turning cold after the blistering weeks of heat that marked the summer months, the ants came out. It always happened at the same time of year. They'd come bursting from the ground, spewing tiny piles of dirt along the gutters and out of the cracks in the broken roads. And there were millions of them. For a day or so the air was filled with flying ants. They got everywhere, even in his clothes and his hair.
Their arrival marked the end of the hot weather and the creeping in of the autumn and the long winter that would bring about the deaths of so many. With little fuel, and nowhere to hide from the chilling winds and the unforgiving snow that would follow, many in the outer areas of the city would perish. Two days before he’d found the boy, he’d been heating a pan of squashed ants over a fire. It had been that time.
You'd think they'd taste foul, but they don't, he thought. With a bit of added mint and some water, they made a broth that tasted as sweet as the sugar that he remembered from his childhood, though Jack knew that memory was probably not as accurate as he believed.
The first time that he'd eaten ant stew, sitting next to a similar fire, many miles away and a lot of years before, he'd turned the offered cup away, finding the idea foul and the withered old man sitting opposite him even more disgusting. The old man had laughed at him, calling him a fool and telling Jack that he'd soon change his mind. And that old grisly fellow had been right.
Jack was amused to see the very same reaction from the boy even as Jack gulped down a whole cup of the dirty, brown, steaming broth. And he was even
more amused a few minutes later when Ryan's growling, empty stomach made the boy change his mind.
It had been just the same for me, thought Jack.
As he’d watched Ryan grimace with the first sip, then look surprised and gulp it down, an idea hit Jack. It was almost exactly a year that they'd been travelling together, which meant it was sort of Ryan's birthday.
And that meant that there needed to be some sort of celebration, somehow. Jack had no clue what he would do for the boy, but he was damn sure that he was going to do something.
Caught
The memory of that day faded as the mustard smell filled his nostrils. He tried to cover his face but knew it was pointless. There would be no vent in the back of the vehicle and he already knew that.
Gas, he thought. This is what they do to people that they’ve caught. He knew that at some point they would want to take everybody off the vehicle, and other than forcing them to move and possibly using violence, the easiest way would be to gas them all out. He wondered for a moment why he was even bothering to cover his mouth. The gas was so thick in the enclosed space that there was no escaping it.
Around him, the cries of fear returned, and the sound of coughing pierced the darkness as people succumbed to the gas. Yet he still held his breath, thinking the same mantra that the old man had taught him, over and over. Slow and shallow. Slow and shallow. He pushed his hand against his hood, using it to filter the air. And he knew it was working, to some degree, but not enough. Bright sparkles of light flickered across his vision, stark in contrast to the darkness around him. He started to feel faint and slightly sickened. He wouldn’t throw up but the dizzying effect of the gas made him feel drunk.
Eventually the coughing and the cries of those around him ceased, and he knew that he was the only one still conscious. Everyone else in the back of the truck had fallen. And there was something else familiar about all this. He tried to recall when he had felt it before.
Just as his eyes started to close, and his body began to collapse into a deep unconsciousness, Jack remembered the sharp sting of the dart that the slaver had used.
The Pits
Many Years Before
Jagan was a name that for many years struck terror into the hearts of every living soul that lived in the Outer Zone. He went by other names, but Jagan was what the people of The Crossing had called the slave baron who ruled from his throne in the open grounds east of 342nd Street.
Jack had seen him from a distance, several times during his days in the pits, and was always in awe of the man’s imposing figure. He was easily seven feet tall and was a mountain of pale muscle covered with armour that Jack thought may have been captured from the Hunters. He wore his bright red hair tied in a single braid that hung down his back, and even from a distance you could see his angry eyes glaring outwards at those he commanded.
The day that Jack had been caught, back when he wasn’t even twenty years old, he had left The Crossing after trading and was heading out into the ruins to find a new spot to set up. He’d turned a corner and found a dozen heavily armed men walking towards him. Their armour was hotchpotch, made up of some pieces of the grey battle gear of the Hunters and mixed up with battered pieces of metal. The leading man, who had to be as tall as Jagan himself, wore armour that Jack thought was made from cut up street signs, and he carried a long heavy metal pole with the word STOP on the metal plate at the end.
He remembered seeing the wagon behind the men, pulled along by a dozen or more gaunt figures, but that was all he’d managed to see before he felt the sharp sting in his left shoulder. He’d looked down and seen a throwing dart sticking out of his clothing, and then he looked back up at the approaching group.
When he awoke he was in the back of the wagon, tied to the metal railings. He had been stripped down to just the t-shirt he wore under his coats and the bottommost pair of jeans. Everything else was gone.
Glass Half Empty
Corporal Lisa Markell stared down at the plate of food on the table in front of her and decided that she wasn’t hungry. It wasn’t that the food was bad - quite the opposite in fact. The RAD - Reconnaissance and Acquisition Division - the section of the Inner Zone’s armed forces that was tasked with the security of all salvage and workforce recruitment operations, and of which she had been a member of her entire adult life, fed their people well.
Too well, some said. The plate in front of her was loaded with carbohydrates and high protein, including meat, which was a rare treat, even for the wealthy who lived inside the barrier, and she felt a pang of guilt as she pushed it away.
“You not eating that?” a voice asked, and Lisa looked up to see Johnson eyeing the plate hungrily. They’d only been sat down for a few minutes and his plate was already empty.
“Help yourself,” Lisa said and pushed the plate across to him.
Her thoughts had been miles away, not paying attention to the hum of activity around her as hundreds of RAD officers and troopers huddled around the long tables in the mess hall, ravenously filling their stomachs. Or more specifically, her mind had been back in the Outer Zone, where she was standing behind the truck as the troopers in her squad climbed back into the armoured personnel carrier after finishing the task of loading the small catch of recruits.
And the man had come out of nowhere, she thought, just appearing a few feet away from her. He stood motionless, watching her and looking behind her into the back of the truck where the captives were.
That had been half an hour ago, and she was still mulling it over. It bothered her. There was something about the way the man looked past her into the darkness of the back of the truck that unnerved her. Unlike almost everyone captured by their raids, this man hadn’t been afraid of her or her troops. She had seen it in his eyes. No fear. And he had just walked up to them, silently, and given himself up.
He’d volunteered.
It had been a first for her, and from what Johnson and the other corporals had said, it was almost unknown for someone to just give themselves up like that. She imagined what she and her troops must look like to those who lived in the ruins. Grey armour over black jumpsuits, a black visor blocking all view of the person inside. When Lisa had first looked in a mirror after donning her battle gear, she had thought that she was looking at someone else. The armour was made to strip all individuality from the person wearing it and was customised to fit. Male, female, thin, bulky - none of those features were obvious from the outside.
The armour was even made to look imposing - frightening even. And it worked for the vast majority of those facing off against them. Sure, sometimes a group of Scavs or some remnant of the old Slave Empire would be among the buildings they were raiding, and they would fight back, but even they had learned to fear the RAD raiders.
Yet this man had calmly given himself up and even climbed into the back of the truck without being pushed or forced. And he’d had the nerve to speak to her.
And she couldn’t get that out of her head.
“What’s eating you?” asked Ellard, another corporal, currently sitting to her right.
Across from Lisa, Johnson stopped eating and grinned. “She got spooked by one of the recruits we picked up.”
Lisa looked up, narrowing her eyes at Johnson.
“I didn’t get spooked,” she said, frowning with irritation.
Johnson shrugged and went back to eating, but Lisa wasn’t letting it go that easily. He’d annoyed her. She turned to Ellard. “This...recruit... He just walked up to us and gave himself in.”
Ellard frowned. “No way,” he said before shovelling in another mouthful of food. “Must be a crazy.”
Possibly, thought Lisa. But she had seen the man’s eyes. And she had caught a lot of crazies in her time, and this guy wasn’t one of them. There had been determination there, she had seen it.
Lisa stood up, pushing her chair back, and left the rest of her comrades to their meal. She knew she’d have to be ready for the Dropship to land at the base in twenty min
utes, and be ready to process her catch at the import facility, but that still gave her a few minutes to head back to squad’s ready room. And there would be no one else there.
Two minutes later she shut the door behind her and walked over to the console on the wall at the far end. She hit the catch on the wall below the computer terminal, waited for the seat to pop out of the wall, and sat down. With one tap the terminal came to life, flickering a few times before displaying the identification screen. A flash of green light swept across her face as the terminal identified her before the familiar view of dozens of info panels appeared.
Lisa stared at the screen.
What the hell am I even doing? She thought.
He’d been looking for a boy.
Lisa tapped the screen and pulled up the roster of recruits, shaking her head as she wondered why she was even bothering.
27, 334.
She narrowed the search, selecting filters for juvenile, and male.
5,723.
Lisa stared at the number and frowned. Had there really been so many captured? More than five thousand? Lisa narrowed the search again, selecting only those still alive.
2341.
More than half of them were dead.
Again she questioned what she was doing. There was no way she was going to find the boy that the man was looking for. Stupid, she thought. I don’t even have a name or age.
The door at the other end of the ready room opened and several of the troops in her squad filed in. Lisa tapped the screen, quickly logging off, stood up and hit the button on the wall that would tuck the console and the seat back into the wall.
As the noise of her fellow RAD members resounded off the walls, she thought about the numbers again.